Flagrant Illegality of Interfering in Affairs of Other Nations
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org - Home - Stephen Lendman)
International law is clear and unequivocal. International laws, treaties, conventions, and agreements are automatically US law under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2).
No nation may legally interfere in the internal affairs of others except in self-defense if attacked - provided Security Council member states authorize military action. Acting otherwise is flagrantly illegal.
Non-intervention is a cardinal principle of international law. It prohibits using force or other means against the territorial integrity and sovereign independence of any nation.
The principle of non-intervention protects the sovereignty, political independence, and territorial integrity of all nations, including the rights of their people.
The US uses NATO as an imperial tool for illegal intervention against targeted nations.
The International Court of Justice ruled that the “element of coercion” by one state against another in any form is “the very essence of prohibited intervention.”
The UN Charter Article 2 states “(a)ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state…”
Article 15 of the Covenant of the League of Nations prohibited intervention by one country against others.
Article 8 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention of Rights and Duties states: “No state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.”
Under Article 10, differences between states “should be settled by recognized pacific methods.”
Article 11 calls sovereign state territory “inviolable…” Other charters and agreements affirm non-intervention, including:
the Organization of American States;
Organization of African Unity;
League of Arab States;
the 1936 Buenos Aires Conference;
the Chapultepec Peace Agreement;
First Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries in Belgrade; and
the 1965 UN Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty, among others.
A 1915 definition states that non-intervention is the absence of "interference by a state or states in the external affairs of another state without its consent, or in its internal affairs with or without its consent.”
In his farewell address, George Washington called for avoiding entangling foreign alliances.
Thomas Jefferson called for “(p)eace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations —entangling alliances with none.”
Except for Panama, Washington pursued treaty and other alliances with no other nations until post-WW II, part of its strategy to dominate them, notably Europe with the creation of the EU by the CIA.
The 1823 Monroe Doctrine was non-interventionist, stating: “In the wars of the European powers, in matters relating to themselves, we have never taken part, nor does it comport with our policy, so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded, or seriously menaced that we resent injuries, or make preparations for our defense.”
In the mid-19th century, Secretary of State William Seward defended “our policy of non-intervention — straight, absolute, and peculiar as it may seem to other nations,” adding:
“(T)he American people must be content to recommend the cause of human progress by the wisdom with which they should exercise the powers of self-government, forbearing at all times, and in every way, from foreign alliances, intervention, and interference.”
From inception, US authorities meddled in the internal affairs of Native Americans, in the name of “progress,” stealing their land, massacring their people to expand the country “from sea to shining sea.”
Throughout its history, the US interfered in the lives and welfare of its ordinary people, exploiting them to benefit the privileged few - Native and Black Americans harmed most of all, African Americans commodified as property, transformed from chattel to wage slavery today, from Jim Crow to its modern-day version, from freedom to mass incarceration.
President Grant failed to get congressional support to annex the Dominican Republic. The principle of non-intervention was ignored during the 1899 - 1902 Spanish American War.
The US colonized Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Expressing outrage in 1900, Mark Twain said “I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines.”
“We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem...And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land...We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields, burned their villages, turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors, (and) subjugated the remaining ten million by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket…”
He proposed a new American flag “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones” — appalled that General Jacob Smith ordered his troops to:
"Kill and burn...this is no time to take prisoners...the more you kill and burn, the better. Kill all above the age of ten...turn (the country into) a howling wilderness.”
Half of Mexico was seized in the mid-19th century. In the early 20th century, the US colonized Central American countries, the hemisphere considered America’s backyard for the past 200 years.
Ordinary Americans opposed US involvement in both world wars. The power of propaganda turned them into raging German haters in 1917, letting Woodrow Wilson get the war he wanted after campaigning against involvement.
Franklin Roosevelt got the war he wanted by forcing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor by waging economic war on the country, nothing surprising about what happened.
US intelligence broke Japan’s codes, knew what was coming. The Japanese fleet was tracked across the Pacific. Pearl Harbor’s Admiral HE Kimmel wasn’t warned.
Waging war then demanded mass casualties to transform a pacifist Congress and public into raging Japan haters. WW II followed. Inventing nonexistent threats work the same way today.
WW I waged to end all future ones made the second global war inevitable. There was nothing good about the misnamed “good war,” the scourge of fascism relocated from Berlin and Tokyo to Washington.
The rest as they say is history. Beginning in June 1950, endless US wars on humanity were waged, along with color revolutions and old-fashioned coup d’etats - aiming to colonize planet earth, control its resources and exploit its people.
Venezuela is in the eye of the storm. Since establishment of social democracy in the country 20 years ago, Republicans and undemocratic Dems aimed to replace it with fascist tyranny, wanting sovereign independent governance eliminated, the US gaining control over the country’s oil reserves, the world’s largest, and its other valued resources.
That is what’s in play now, the fate of the nation at stake - to remain free and independent or controlled by the scourge of Washington’s aim to rule the world.
Non-interventionism is a well-established principle of international law. Time and again, the US flouts it unaccountably, operating by its own rules alone, humanity paying the price at home and abroad.
Intervening on the pretext of democracy building, humanitarian intervention or responsibility to protect have no legal standing in international or US constitutional law.
The stakes are huge: freedom or fascism, democracy or rule by monied interests, war or peace, social justice or eliminating it altogether, governance of, by, and for everyone equitably or just for the privileged few - in America, Venezuela and everywhere else.
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